We finally had a little bit of snow (now long since obliterated by the weather turning warm again) and I took a walk in it to get photos of Christmas lights. I also found some beautiful snow-frosted sidewalk stamps. I love the way snow settles into the lettering; in some cases, as in the B.F. Churchill stamp below, it even makes it more legible.
A 1944 Department of Public Works stamp on Regent Street.
This 1908 B.F. Churchill stamp on Regent was one of the stamps that first motivated this blog. The extreme purple cast is due to a defective LED street light.
In honor of the holiday, here are some of the photos I took of Christmas lights on my walk. I have really come to enjoy walking alone in snowy quiet after night falls, stopping to stand in front of Christmas displays and admire them. Driving around to admire lights is nice, and I do that too, but there is something special about the intimacy of doing it on foot. Being a pedestrian is underrated.
Here it is: some brand new sidewalk! The Consumers Energy utility work that has closed a lane on East Kalamazoo Street off and on for months has finally reached the stage when a lot of the torn-out sections of sidewalk are being replaced. And, while it’s not the most exciting design I’ve seen, it is all properly stamped. This is just one of many examples, in this case on the southeast corner of Kalamazoo and Regent, in front of the vacant former Lucky’s/Pure Options.
I am assuming that the responsible party is EPM Professional Grounds Services of Jackson, Michigan. The name stands for Executive Property Management, referencing the fact that they specialize in commercial properties.
This bit of sidewalk graffiti is very familiar to me. It’s on the east side of Regent Street between Michigan and Kalamazoo (more specifically, the 200 block) and I pass it all the time since I only live a block or two away. It appears to read “MERC” and I often muse about it. I have worked out in some of my past blog entries that a name in the walk almost certainly belonged to someone who once lived in that house. The most likely guess in this case is the same. And yet…
As I walked by it this evening I got to thinking about what kind of name, or nickname, “Merc” is. Was it short for something? What name could it even be short for: Mercedes? Then it came back to me: when I first moved to Lansing, the girl who lived next door with her (apparently) single mother was named Mercedes. She went by “Merce,” as I would have spelled it, though as I never saw it spelled out should could have spelled it “Merc” for all I know. If a Virgil can be Virg pronounced Verge, than a Mercedes can be Merc pronounced Merce. She introduced me to how startlingly children serve as a proxy for the passage of time. My first year in the house she was young enough to go trick or treating and then one day I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while. The last time I saw her next door – presumably returning for a visit – I saw that she was a young adult and I could barely understand how or when that had happened. I think it wasn’t too much later that my neighbor moved away too.
I have no reason to think this mark was left by the Merc(e) who was one of my original neighbors, especially since it wasn’t left in front of her old house which is, as I said, a couple of blocks away. But I can’t rule it out, either. After all, if you were the right age and walking by a freshly-poured slab of concrete, and had a stick handy…
It’s final grading week and I spent last night up until the early hours grading exams and I’ll probably be doing it again tonight, so here’s a late and low-key update. This is from a driveway apron on the east side of Regent Street between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth. I’ve been able to see the date for a while, but recently the name has also suddenly become more visible. It’s hard to see in this photo, but the last several letters are SSETT indicating it is, unfortunately, just a regular old C. Gossett stamp, similar to very many others on this block.
I’ve never been able to learn anything in my research about C. Gossett or find a single reference to them, despite how many sidewalks they laid in around here in the 1960s.
As has been noted here before, I like the way that sidewalk stamps lend texture to the snow when it has freshly fallen on the sidewalk. So, since it was too snowy to find anything interesting tonight, enjoy a couple of glamour shots. No doubt this is a Cantu & Sons stamp, probably from 1987 or 1988, but I didn’t want to disturb the snow to find out. This is from the east side of Regent Street just north of Kalamazoo.
Recently, my husband drew my attention to the fact that some sidewalk had just been marked with spray paint by a city employee. I looked over in that direction – the east side of the 400 block of Regent Street – and immediately knew which bit of walk it was. It’s a spot where two slabs have subsided where they meet, leaving a V-shaped valley. It has been a hazard to me on my frequent walks around here because it fills with mud in the summer and ice in the winter and in both conditions it has been the cause of my slipping more than once.
In this photo, the marked area is past the driveway seen center-left. Parked on the street to the right is the city vehicle responsible.
It would be nice to think that the spray paint markings mean that the walk is slated to be replaced soon. In my experience, that is not necessarily true. Often they seem to paint trip hazards just to make them visible, without actually doing anything to rectify them. I’m sure it’s on a list to deal with eventually, but “eventually” can be a long time.
I am a little surprised to see it marked, though, because there are a lot worse sidewalks in the area for being trip hazards. The street trees have heaved up blocks of cement in countless places around the east side and I’ve taken hard falls from tripping on them at night more times than I care to remember.
This marking is on a driveway facing the sidewalk, on the west side of the 300 block of Regent Street, between Michigan and Kalamazoo. It’s visible enough to be intriguing, but not visible enough to read. There seem to be two lines of text, with the bottom one more visible.
Please excuse the bit of my fuzzy glove visible. It was a cold day.
The letters that can be most easily made out are “JAM” and I think the next two are “IE,” which made me think “Jamieson.” Unfortunately, that clue didn’t end up unlocking anything for me in my searches. The line above it looks to include “DDY,” but that’s not much to go on. But I have come to realize it is probably actually the names of people who lived in the house at one time: the bottom one is probably just plain Jamie, and perhaps the other one is “Daddy” or “Buddy.”
I could not see the handprints with my eyes at the time, but they have become visible in this photo, which makes it very clear this isn’t a contractor’s mark but a memento.
This is an encore appearance by this hard-to-read C.D. Chamberlain stamp alongside the former Pagoda restaurant on the southwest corner of Regent and Michigan. I wanted to show how a previously illegible stamp can suddenly reveal itself under the right conditions. This one taunted me for a long time, until one day I had a eureka moment. This is the most legible I’ve ever see it, though, thanks to the perfect combination of snow-melt water and silt collecting in the shallow impressions.
This gives me an idea for my next big project, now that I’ve mined just about the entire east side for interesting stamps. I should go back and check the ones I originally tagged as illegible to see if anything has changed, ideally after a bit of wet weather has come through.
The weather recently hasn’t been very conducive to hunting sidewalk stamps, so all I can do is show you something pretty. This O & M (city Operations & Maintenance) stamp is one you’ve seen before. In fact, it’s the first stamp ever featured in this blog. But this time it’s got a light dusting of snow in it, left behind after the sidewalk was cleared, and I just love how that looks.
It’s on the east side of Regent Street’s 400 block, between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth.
This fading graffiti is on the driveway apron of a house on the 400 block of Regent Street (between Kalamazoo and Elizabeth). I often find that such graffiti reflects who lived in the adjacent house at the time, though the research I’m able to do online doesn’t tell me who that was. I do find that in the 1960s, there was a police officer in Lansing named Thomas Gallie. I don’t have any way to connect him with this and it may be a relative or just a sheer coincidence.
I know only a couple of things about Gallie. One is that he was the defendant in a lawsuit, as reported in the February 2, 1966, Battle Creek Enquirer. (Interestingly I was not able to find anything in the [Lansing] State Journal about it.) An MSU senior sued Gallie and three other police officers for brutality, alleging that he was beaten at the police station. The student was later found not guilty of drunken driving, which he claimed he was charged with as a ploy to cover up the beating. The next reference I can find to Gallie is in the February 21, 1968, State Journal,in a summary of recent business of the Police Board. It briefly mentions that Gallie has submitted his resignation in order to take a job with the state, and notes that he is the only officer in the department with a master’s degree.
